


Barrayaran Babbles

by Zoya1416



Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Crack, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-21
Updated: 2015-12-21
Packaged: 2018-05-08 03:03:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5480897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zoya1416/pseuds/Zoya1416
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>ExtraPenguin has me in stitches with the vfgbbekzh (Monitoring the Teens) fic</p><p>ImpSec monitors a new form of electronic communications, used mainly by teens.</p><p>So I came up with one more terrible idea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Barrayaran Babbles

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [vfgbbekzh (Monitoring The Teens)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5196677) by [ExtraPenguin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExtraPenguin/pseuds/ExtraPenguin). 



When Miles entered Count Vorrutyer's household, the last thing he expected to hear was hysterical cackling. The cackling seemed high pitched and was combined with a lower noise he'd have called guffawing. Some whoops finished off this odd cacophony. Curious, he didn't wait to be announced but poked his head around the doorway of the music room. Or at least it had been a music room when last he'd seen it. Now it seemed to be an way-station; piled up carpets and the smell of new construction further down the hall suggested a refurbishing of an original office. 

So now an little office, although not particularly a private one...Tatya Vorbretton, Olivia, and Dono were all staring at a comconsole screen and didn't see him enter until he was practically at their elbows. 

"Something especially amusing, Count Dono, Countesses Tatya and Olivia?" The trio, who had subsided a bit, looked up at him and went into even higher merriment. Miles was annoyed. He hadn't done anything lately for anyone to laugh at: no disastrous dinner parties, no ice-sculpture rutting rabbits at his wedding; no public or private scandals. Even the butterbugs and the cats had been well behaved. Nothing. Lord Vorkosigan was a dull dog these days.

Dono recovered first. "Come on Miles, let's leave these ladies to their silliness. Wine or coffee?"

"Coffee. But I want to know what the joke is--you all started laughing harder when you saw me."

"Ah, the brilliant mind of our age. Come in here," urged Dono, opening a library on the other side of the hall. He actually put his hand on Miles' arm to usher him away from the little office.

Dono turned on a switch for mild daylight levels, and hurriedly to a comconsole on the far side of the book lined room. Miles looked around. He was always suspicious of these huge libraries, which suggested books bought by the yard and never read. Dono noticed him watching and chuckled. 

"Okay, I haven't read them all, but they are real books. I'm skimming them to see what I can turf out. Pierre kept some odd medical literature, dating back to the last century. It may be all quackery, but might be interesting. I tried to inveigle Profesora Vorthys into letting me have a graduate student, but she didn't think there would be enough for a paper, so she--"

But Miles knew stonewalling by piffle when he heard it. "Dono, if it's just giggles, why all--"

"Okay, but you have to remember you asked for this. The rise in the network in the city, and the presence of very bored people, most of them teenagers, has created something--odd. The teens write stories about books they've read, and upload them to these computer forums."

"So? Teens voluntarily writing book reports doesn't sound very funny; something we should encourage for greater literacy."

Dono gave a choking cough. "They're not writing book reports. They're writing their own versions of what they think should have happened in a book, or a vid series, or an account of a scene which seems to have been left out. Some of them are quite short--they're called babbles. So far so good. But some of these people have a great deal of free time, and--to be frank, they're writing a lot of sex scenes for their characters."

"Pornography, you mean."

"Some very explicit, true, but some more just very romantic. And to stop any further questions, sometimes they write what they call live-fiction. It-they use real people in their stories, and just, well, make up stories."

Miles gave a small glare. Dono hurried on, "Um, well, they've written some about you."

"Show me."

"Okay, but you have to understand, nobody believes these, they're just entertainment."

'These' were a series of well-written, if horrifying, fiction pieces entitled, "The Small Ambassador," and started with the premise that he, Miles Vorkosigan, and Ghem-General Dag Benin were lov--no. He wished there was brain bleach he could use. He was not going to look any further, but Dono continued on inexorably now.

"Today's offering was this:

"LordAuditorMilesVorkosigan has the power to order summary executions--" What? And how did they know anyway, except, well, it probably was on record somewhere, "to order summary executions, so he completely has the power to order a certain ghem-lord to prove he's not carrying haut-lady bio-weapons by ordering him to strip. Slowly. Strangely, the ghem-lord seems to like it."

That was the summary, and then the implausible story carried the auditor and the ghem-general into sexual scenarios where--Cetagandans did not have flexibility for that, even post-human as they were.

As a form of literature it ranked just above bathroom wall scribbles. Mostly. But many of these scenes proposed him as the--"active ingredient," so to speak. He'd never imagined Dag in a sex scene, especially one with him but it was nice to see that some people didn't consider his, Miles,' small size to be a problem. Except that there was fan art, too, and--well, small size wasn't the problem in these pics. And while showing a disturbing lack of clothing, they did award him with far larger muscles and, well, and...well...than he really had. He looked at one picture sideways. That would require him to be even quite a bit longer, no--that wouldn't have been possible at all, and as for poor Dag--that had to be very uncomfortable. Why couldn't he have gotten pictures praising his physique, (but leaving out the homosexuality) like this when he was seventeen? 

"What does ImpSec say about this?"

Dono scrolled down to something calling itself 'impsex-official,' and then to ImpSecOfficial. They had taken down a--what? "Dono, what was this? Why did it get taken down?"

Dono said in a bored tone, "It was a picture of the emperor riding horseback, shirtless; the picture had obviously used another source for the rider and badly overlain the face with a picture of Gregor. It was obviously falsified."

"Even if it had been real, could they have published this? Gregor would hate it."

Dono waggled his hand back and forth. "I'm not sure. They don't make it easy for anyone to get close enough to Gregor. Probably ImpSec would have suppressed it. They do keep tabs. If your writers--"

"Not MY writers--"

"if the authors are especially scurrilous, the material is redacted. The Emperor says--you should know this, you see him more often--he's quietly put it about that a free press isn't totally free to attack a person's character. Caricature, yes."

In true Impsec style, Miles quickly forced the machine to divulge information about 'his' writers. There were two major offenders. He smiled evilly as he prepared letters for each electronic mail account. 

"Miles, you can't--what are you doing?--that's very demeaning."

"They write fiction about me, I'll write the 'truth' about them."

He finished his letters. "Now, let's see about finding out who owns these accounts."--

"Miles, that's called fat-shaming. It's not nice." He'd found with a picture of a quite obese woman, with a supposed weight below, ready to receive the overlay photos he had ordered the network to produce.

He was all set to receive the account-holders' pictures, when Dono slammed his wrist to the desk.

"They're not ignorant, you know. They'll trace the letters back to me, and I won't have it. Come on, Miles--do you not find it at least a little amusing to think that some women besides your wife think you're a sexy match for a very large Cetagandan? Let it alone."

He let it alone, reluctantly, until the next day, when two private mails slotted into his comconsole. One offered him virtual cookies, from a lovely serving dish placed on a piano; the other offered a beautiful sketch--one could even say drawn from memory--of a Ma Kosti spread. Each had a single line.

"Sorry." TVB.  
"Sorry, but Ekaterin said it was funny." OKVR.

He clenched his teeth and went in search of his no-longer-overly-socialized wife.


End file.
